Month: March 2007

The Troy-Bilt Horse walking rototiller is back in action for the first day of tilling in the field. I prepped a 50’x50′ section for snap peas. The Horse is noisy and uses a fair (though not unreasonable) share of gas, …

It’s around 8:30 in the morning and I’m about to uncover the early lettuce. Floating row cover is a very lightweight spunbonded polyester, light enough not to crush seedlings when laid down directly on top. It lets in water and …

My box of back issues finally arrived. Reading through it may cause my head to explode (so many things to try, so little time :), but I’ll take the chance! This is the entire collection, seven years worth, of a fantastic market gardeners’ monthly newsletter called Growing for Market. Tiny farming lies in a kind of information nowhere land between gardening and large-scale agriculture. Most of what I do is straight from gardening methods, but the scale is a little…bigger, with things to do and problems to solve that just don’t happen in even a very large personal garden. Meanwhile, commercial farming info is all about tractors and agrochemicals and acres of one crop at a time. All wrong. So where do you learn the best way to stake 500 tomato plants, or how to keep veggies fresh for half a day at a hot outdoor summer market?

Five weeks after seeding in plugsheets under lights, around 180 little lettuces are in the ground. Especially without a hardening off stage, they’ll have a bit of struggle in the greenhouse-hot days and subzero nights ahead, but that’s the gamble …